Between Friends Page 21

  ‘You’ll soon get used to it, Meggie, you see. We’ve been lucky falling on our feet like this.’ Mrs Whitley’s voice was soothing. She worried about these two at times for she knew they still grieved badly for Emm and it was hard to convince Tom that the fire had not been his fault. She had watched Meg, and Martin, try to persuade him that it had been an accident. No-one would ever know how it really started. Emm, distracted by God alone knew what, must have gone into one of the bedrooms, still carrying the fatal shovel of coals for her charred body had been found next to a bedroom window on the first floor, just above the stairs, the stairs beneath which the lamp oil had been put, and forgotten! Tom had been distraught but Meg, herself carrying a burden of guilt at having been the one to suggest that Emm should carry the coals, something they had often done in the past, had shared his sorrow with him, and their young minds had finally been able to accept it.

  She put out a hand to Meg but the girl stood up abruptly, moving away to look out of the small window. The trees were beginning to show a haze of gold and bronze and copper and at the foot of each trunk wild fuschia grew profusely, their bright red bells delicately nodding in the sun and the slight breeze which moved them. Across the drive and near the entrance gates to the estate the lodge-keeper’s wife came from her small house, a child clinging to her skirts and she turned to lift him into her arms, giving him a resounding kiss before sending him into the garden at the back. An untidy terrier amiably allowed himself to be dragged with the child and Meg could see the two of them rolling happily together in the carpet of harebells which covered it.

  ‘Have a bit of turnover, lovey, before Tom eats it up. See, I walked down to the home farm this morning and begged a bit of cream from the farmer’s wife. Well, I made her a fruit cake, she says she’s no good with anything fancy and her Jack does love fruit cake so it was a fair exchange. Will I pour a bit on for you?’

  Meg turned and looked at the kindly old woman who was doing her best to console her. Mrs Whitley’s face had filled out in the seven or eight months they had been here and was rosy now in her improved health. Her cough had gone and she had put on weight. It seemed she was not averse to a ‘walk’ to the farm and had apparently become friendly with those about her and her days were pleasantly filled, calm, untroubled as was her due. It was time she retired. Mr Lloyd, poor chap, had said so – not to Mrs Whitley, mind – a dozen times and now her last days would be comfortable. She, Meg had no right to be snivelling like some spoiled child when Mrs Whitley, Martin, and Tom had fallen so happily into the order of their new lives and if she could just be given some specific job to do, like the housemaids for instance, or a parlourmaid, with a decent uniform to wear instead of the skivvy’s outfit she was forced into she might settle to it. If she could take some pride in her own job with a proper place in the household instead of being at everyone’s beck and call she’d feel better, she was sure. It was not that she was afraid of hard work. God, nobody had worked harder from the age of six or seven than she had, and she took great pride in her own conscientious industry but it was galling to have to watch servants doing work she could do far better and in half the time.

  ‘Don’t fret, lass.’ Mrs Whitley’s face was anxious for she hated to see one of her three down in the dumps. ‘Give it a bit longer and you’ll settle in. You know there’s only one way to get on in a big house like this and that’s to do your work, willingly, and keep on the right side of those above you. You’ll make your mark, lass, and be out of that kitchen before you realise it! I know what I’m talking about, Meg. I worked just like you, running here and there after everyone …’

  ‘But I can do so much more than skivvying, Mrs Whitley.’ Meg’s face was mutinous.

  ‘I know that, but you’ll get nowhere if you’re … sullen.’

  ‘Sullen! I’m not sullen!’

  ‘You want to look in the mirror, our Meg.’ Tom stood up and reached for his cap. ‘You’ve got a face on you like the back of a tramp steamer.’ He was impatient to be off to the more important concerns of the stable where one of Mr Robert’s beautiful mares was about to foal, an event he had never yet witnessed and which he had been told was little short of a miracle and not to be missed. He grew tired of Meg’s discontent at times and could hardly understand it in view of the wonder of their new lives. Why, he couldn’t have found a better place for himself if he had been given the choice, and he had never been happier and he knew Martin felt the same. Now if Meg would just knuckle down to a bit of discipline and watch her tongue she would soon be in the good graces of both Mrs Stewart, who was not a bad old stick, and Mrs Glynn who was old, nearly as old as Mrs Whitley and ready for retirement! Get on their good side and their Meg could be in line to take her place.

  ‘I have not, have I, Mrs Whitley?’ Meg was incensed.

  ‘You don’t look contented, Meg and that’s a fact and if you get on the wrong side of that Mrs Stewart you’ll spend the rest of your days on your knees in the scullery. Smile lovey! You’ve got a lovely smile and say “Yes please” and “No, thank you” and bob a curtsey and before long you’ll be made up to parlour maid …’

  ‘I’ve a good mind to have a word with the old gentleman!’

  Tom whirled, his hand on the latch of the door which he had been just about to open. His preoccupied expression was quite suddenly wiped away and his face was stern and his smiling mouth had tightened into a remorseless line. Not much of a one for anger, unless goaded, when it erupted from him it was all the more challenging. He took a step towards her as she stood with her back to the window, ready to give her a sharp piece of his mind, for had not the old gentleman already done more than enough for them? As he moved in her direction the sunshine touched her hair, shining through the tumbled curls, outlining her head in a halo of burnished gold. Her face was in shadow but her eyes glowed a pale amber and Tom felt something start to move inside him, as if his heart had come loose and for an alarming moment he could not speak, only stare wordlessly at this beautiful girl he had known all his life. Her face was defiant, her lips clamped wilfully across her white teeth, her eyebrows dipped in a furious frown as she waited impatiently for what he had to say but suddenly he could not speak and for the life of him he did not know why!

  ‘Well,’ she said, hazardously, ‘what have you got to say, then? You mean to give me a piece of your mind, I can see it in your face so let’s have it.’

  ‘No … no … it’s …’ Tom put a hand to his own bright curls, pushing his fingers through them and Meg stared at him curiously.

  ‘Well, Tom Fraser?’

  ‘Don’t do it, Meg.’ At last he could get his tongue round the words though his heart was still thumping in his chest. ‘If you speak to the old man he’ll think we’re ungrateful.’ He was finding it easier now and he had time to wonder at his own foolishness. ‘Give it another month or two. Do as Mrs Whitley says and make yourself pleasant to those above you. It’ll work out, gospel, our kid.’ His face lost its look of sternness, the inherent gentleness of his nature unable to withstand her misery. ‘You’ll find your place, just like I have, and Martin. Come on, our Meg, give us a smile and next week, if we can get an afternoon off together I’ll take you into Liverpool to see Madame Tussaud’s. You know you’ve been wanting to go. What d’you say?’

  He grinned engagingly and was rewarded by a lessening of the fierce scowl on Meg’s face. Her lips curved reluctantly into a faint smile and her eyes lost the hard look of amber and became a soft shade of honey. The stiffness in her posture drained away and she let out her breath on a sigh. Moving away from the window she sat down opposite Mrs Whitley, her knees to the fire. She turned again to look at Tom, then answered his grin with her own.

  ‘Oh go on then, don’t stand there scowin’. Go and get back to this work you love so much,’ but it was said good-naturedly. She became serious again and her face assumed a look of youthful maturity. ‘I suppose you’re right and I suppose I’ve got to try my best to get used to it. What else can I do b
ut work so damned hard they’ll not be able to get along without me and before you know it I’ll have Mrs Stewart’s job from her and before you say a word I could do it an’ all. Now go on, you daft lump. Go and do whatever it is that’s so important. I’ll have another half an hour with Cook. I’m not due back yet and they’re not getting me in that kitchen a minute before my time’s up!’

  It was a longer route than by the driveway which led from the gates up to the house but Meg felt the need to be completely alone for a few minutes more and so she crossed the gravelled stretch in front of Mrs Whitley’s cottage and entered the closely standing trees of the spinney opposite. A straight, wide path divided the wood, thick and crisp with the early leaves from the autumn falling and it was quiet, still as the pale blue sky above her head. A blackbird sang somewhere and her skirt brushed against the dry and crackling stalks of bracken which lined the path but these were the only sounds to be heard and she felt the peace of it slip smoothly into her heart. Tom was right and so was Mrs Whitley, and she should be thankful that they were all settled so safely. The house in which she had lived for six years of her life was only a shell now and there was nothing there but the ghost of poor Emm who had died in it. You should not keep looking back to what had been, regretting its passing but must make the most of what had been given in its place and look to what the future would hold. Tom was happy here but then Tom would be happy anywhere as long as he was surrounded by people he liked and who liked him. He was popular with the maids, smiling his cheeky smile and promising God knows what with those blue eyes of his and even the manservants trusted him for it was in his nature to be reliable, good humoured and hardworking. She knew she herself was restless and irritable, still haunted by the fire and what had gone before it but that would pass with time and she would find whatever it was she searched for and be at peace with all those around her.

  She had seen nothing of the old gentleman except for an infrequent glimpse of him in the stable yard which was in clear view of the back kitchen window. He and Martin would be deep in absorbed conversation, their expressions rapt, their manner serious as they studied, or poked and prodded whatever it was beneath the bonnets of the various motor cars which were grouped there. It seemed that now he had fulfilled his obligation in the placing of herself, Tom and Mrs Whitley in sheltered and decent employment he need no longer concern himself with them and there was nothing more, surely, he could do? He had been kind on the night of the fire, sensitive to her bruised, violated emotions and she would never forget it. At one point in the evening, when Tom and Martin had gone and she and Mrs Whitley had been left alone with him she had found herself, surprisingly, held in his arms as she wept. He had comforted her most understandingly and several times during that night of troubled sleep she had been aware of a gentle hand on her feverish brow and a quiet word soothing her back to rest.

  Several days later she had gone to his study, alone, and for an hour they had talked and she had finally understood, and believed him when he explained to her, that the misery they had suffered under Benjamin Harris had been done to them without his knowledge. He had even apologised to her, just as though she was of his own class and not merely a servant in his home, and told her seriously that she was to come to him at any time if she should have a problem.

  She had had none, not really, beyond her strange inability to settle down and make a home in this beautiful house. She shared a room under the eaves with Lizzie, another kitchen-maid, but then she was used to that for had not she and Emm shared not only a room but a bed for six years. Here she had her own, small, scrupulously clean and warm, and the bedroom, though sparsely furnished, was comfortable. Lizzie, inclined to chatter endlessly, was willing to be friendly and there was always as much good, often what Mrs Whitley would have called fancy food as she could eat on the table.

  She took a deep breath of sharp country air, glancing about her appreciatively as she sauntered along the path which would bring her out at the back of the house. It really was a pretty day. Harebells dominated her senses with their superb purple colour and scabious and bramble bushes, heavy with fruit. She picked a fat blackberry and popped it in her mouth savouring its ripe, sun-filled taste. She would come this way on her next visit and fill a basket for Mrs Whitley and they would have a pie, straight from the oven, hot and with the thick cream which came from the home farm. She smiled.

  Chestnut trees rested shoulder to shoulder with aspen and the broad oak which had stood when Liverpool had been granted its charter by King John.

  She blinked and shied nervously for he startled her badly as he stepped out from behind a thick trunk and the sun shining through the leaves silhouetted him against the green of a holly bush and he looked like a cloaked spirit which had risen from the ground it stands on. She became quite still, unmoving, when she saw who it was, like a young animal which senses a trap and she was deathly afraid. Though there were a dozen men labouring within earshot she felt the pulse beat painfully in her throat and her terror grew.

  ‘Well Megan,’ he said softly, ‘here we are at last, you and I, though our respective positions in life are somewhat altered, wouldn’t you say? You are well, I trust?’

  ‘What d’you want?’ She almost called him ‘sir’, the habit of six years in service hard to break. Her voice was icy and though she feared him dreadfully, it was steady.

  ‘Now Megan! Is that the way to speak to an old … friend?’ His smile was lazy but as Benjamin Harris ran his speculative eyes about the maturing roundness of her body, his expression was thick with venom.

  Her breath was rapid in her throat but she managed a defiant answer.

  ‘We’re not friends and never … never will be!’ The memory of their last encounter was vivid in her mind and she felt a violent need to vomit as her stomach churned but she gathered herself to control it. The words he had spoken to her then, obscene and filthy, rang still in her ears and she wanted to run, to lift up her skirts and take to her heels and leap along the path which led to the house and safety but he stood in her way. She glanced behind her, weighing her chances of darting back the way she had come but he put up a hand. Though he did not touch her it was as though he had her fast in its grip.

  ‘I shouldn’t if I were you, Megan. That way only leads to the old woman and she cannot defend you.’

  She could feel the crazed beating of her heart in her breast and it seemed to her it would bang its way up into her throat and choke her. She could feel the fast, erratic lift of the material of her blouse as it tried to tear its way out through her chest and she could quite definitely feel the urging of her bladder to let go its contents as he took a step towards her.

  He smiled and shook his head almost playfully. She could not speak. She could not have screamed had she been given the chance for her mouth was as dry as the shrivelling autumn leaves beneath her feet.

  ‘So, you have settled in here, have you, my dear, you and that idiot kitchen boy, and the old woman too. Oh yes, I have seen her in her cottage parlour, nursing her black cat before her fire like a witch! You should tell her to draw her curtains at night, Megan, and lock her door for who knows who could be lurking about in these woods.’ He laughed softly.

  She made a tiny sound in her throat and her pale creamy skin took on a tinge of yellow. Her eyes were wide and unblinking and only her hands moved as they plucked at her skirt.

  ‘Yes, very comfortable, all of you, here at Silverdale with old man Hemingway to look after you.’ He seemed to swell with some emotion she could not recognise and though he appeared to be even thinner than the last time she had seen him, his face became bloated and suffused with a dangerously violent colour. ‘Oh yes, Robert Hemingway takes care of those to whom he feels a sense of responsibility, be it friendly or hostile.’ His lips bared across his teeth. ‘He is quite a clever man, you know. Unfortunately I discovered that fact when it was too late, but enough of that, my dear. Tell me how you have fared since we last met. Are you kitchenmaid, or perhaps you have at
tained the exalted position of under-parlourmaid by now? I am sure you are destined for great things, a pretty and dedicated girl like yourself and strangely, you owe it all to me, Megan. Did you know that?’ His teeth glinted again between his lips.

  She found her voice at last. It sounded piteously faint in the straining rictus of her mouth but she got it out somehow.

  ‘I don’t owe you anything.’

  ‘Come Megan, surely …’

  ‘I owe you nothing and if you don’t get out of my way I’ll …’

  ‘Oh but you do, you see. You owe me my job, my career, my position, my good name, even my very character.’

  ‘Your …?’

  ‘Do you know where I have been for the past six months, Megan?’ He seemed to grow taller and thinner as he loomed menacingly over her and she shrank away from him. ‘Do you, Megan, do you?’

  She stared at him, a rabbit hypnotised, paralysed by the stoat.

  ‘Answer me, dammit,’ and she jumped and tears came to her eyes for she was but a young and terrified girl.

  ‘No!’

  It seemed to satisfy him and he smiled and into his eyes came a strange expression in which was mixed hatred, a deep and terrible malevolence and yet a kind of pleasure as if at some private memory.

  ‘Well I will tell you. I will tell you where I have been and what has been done to me then I will tell you what is to happen to you. Are you listening?’

  She nodded and the tears slipped helplessly down her cheeks.

  ‘I have been in prison, Megan. You did not know that, did you? Yes, I have been in Walton Gaol at the pleasure of His Majesty. Six months they gave me.’ His voice was bizarre, a chant of rhythmic plaining which gave him the appearance of a child repeating some lesson it has learned and repeats by rote, spoken again and again until it is word perfect, with no perception of its meaning and yet Benjamin Harris knew exactly what he was speaking of and what it had done to him. Singular he had been before but now he was deranged without the power to reason. It seemed to imply, as he meant it to imply that he was no longer in control of his own actions and therefore could not be blamed for them for had they not been forced upon him by a great wrong. A great wrong done him by … by … by …!